I’ve started reading my grandma’s memoirs and luckily she doesn’t try to hide what she thought of the Nazis back then. And according to her that hero figure was Adolf Hitler. The worker’s man who finally does something against the evil communists and help make Germany feel better again.

For her that even was the case at first. Her husband had a good job at a newspaper that printed propaganda so she wasn’t poor anymore. And he was part of the party and later organised propaganda-vacations that made everyone (non-jewish) feel good.

Then his benefits started to be cut, they went from having a car plus a car with chauffeur, to just having the one with the chauffeur until that was cut as well. But I think that was just part of life for them. I think the only time they themselves felt any repression under the regime was when they couldn’t give their firstborn daughter her intended name because it was of Jewish origin.

Then the war started, he was drafted and later fell. When he was home once he was treated with respect because of his uniform. During the war my grandma had to flee from bombs from city to city with now two daughters, living with relatives. At times it felt like vacation, at others it was bad for everyone.

Haven’t gotten to the end of the war yet in the book. Unfortunately Long Covid made reading so much difficult for me. I now found a decent AI text to speach to read the book to me. That seems to be easier to handle and I can hopefully soon continue when my PC is done.